Fact-Check — Is Cape Town being set alight by arsonists?

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In December 2023 alone, the City of Cape Town’s emergency services responded to 2,425 vegetation fires. 

Table Mountain National Parks recently reported an increase in fire incidents, recording almost one a day, over January 2024. 

Is it possible that all these fires are occurring organically – or is the real cause some kind of concerted arson campaign?

Many on social media believe that the sheer number of fires on Cape Town’s mountains are suspicious – and that it might even be part of some kind of campaign to destabilise the DA-led Western Cape ahead of this year’s general elections.

A statement said that in the case of at least three of these fires investigated by Enviro Wildfire, it was suspected that blazes had been started with malicious intent.

Fire and arson?

But Enviro Wildfire, the company which is often brought in to investigate the cause of wildfires, has said that most of these fires are not arson.

The company said in a Facebook post on 8 January: “Enviro Wildfire is regularly appointed by landowners, the authorities, insurance companies and attorneys to conduct veldfire investigations across the Western Cape and further afield.

“ The vast majority of these fires are as a result of negligence, such as vagrants or religious groups failing to properly extinguish a camping or cooking fire. 

“Just because an ignition results in a big fire or there are numerous fires on a single day does not automatically indicate that it is malicious. While arson does account for some fires, they are not as common as is assumed.”

International organisation Global Forest Watch, which tracks the loss of vegetation around the world, also reports that the volume of recent fires in Cape Town is normal, compared to the total for previous years going back to 2012. It states that the highest number of significant fires recorded in a year was in 2015 (with 210). 

Two veld fire factors

Two factors are basically considered to make wildfires around Cape Town inevitable. The high amount of very flammable alien vegetation, and the volume of people moving around the veld.

A third factor is climate change. Researchers have warned that fires in Cape Town are likely to get more frequent and a little worse, as severe wildfire weather conditions are worsening. 

There is a final point to note: In other places around the world where the rate and intensity of local wildfires are increasing, populations are also looking for political conspiracies to explain them. 

In the US, in the Pacific Northwest, for instance, devastating fires in recent years have been blamed on left-wing activist collective Antifa, even though there is absolutely no evidence for this, and the FBI has tried to shut down the rumours.

As we often see it’s easier to scapegoat politics than to have serious discussions about environmental policy. DM